Mariinsky Ballet: Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and Juliet calls for a degree of tenderness. Strip it out and you're left with a melodrama of mishaps and misunderstandings. Last week's production at Covent Garden seemed at times to have done just that, losing sight of the poetry and leaving the dancers struggling against a choreography and direction that emphasised drama and spectacle rather than love.

The Mariinsky Ballet, known as the Kirov in the Soviet era, is in Britain for two weeks with a blockbusting programme at the Royal Opera House that includes Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and works by Balanchine. For British audiences, it's a chance to see this remarkable company perform with its famed classical precision.

The season opened with Leonid Lavrovsky's Romeo and Juliet - not the Kenneth MacMillan version with which British audiences are familiar, but one that premiered in 1940. Nothing wrong with that - the 19th century ballets are still going strong - but this production, with its medieval-somewhere-in-Europe sets, felt old-fashioned, an impression some hammy acting did nothing to mitigate.

It wouldn't have surprised me if Tybalt (Ilya Kuznetsov) had swept on twirling moustaches, since he did everything else in the panto villain's handbook. He wasn't the only offender: Lord Capulet's shaking fists when Juliet refused to marry Paris were funny when he should have been outraged, hurt, confused, disappointed, a lot of things it ought to be possible to convey with a turn of the head, a movement of the arm. But time and again, Extreme Acting got in the way of the dancing.

What the production needed to offset this was a dazzling Romeo and Juliet. On opening night, Juliet was danced by the newcomer Alina Somova to mixed reviews. On Wednesday, I saw the vibrant Viktoria Tereshkina, whose dancing was technically brilliant, sensitive and expressive. I could happily have spent an evening watching the exquisite lines of her hands alone. The music seemed to flow through her so that she became not quite corporeal.

After she met Romeo (Evgeny Ivanchenko), she was full of joy but also distraction, as if she knew what was coming. Ivanchenko was a generous partner, his physical impressiveness counterpointed by a sense that he was bewildered by emotion. It was Tereshkina who most powerfully connected with the audience, but they were an engaging partnership.

This is not to deny that there were treats - the jesters, a playful and poignant Mercutio (Alexander Sergeyev) and plenty of fine dancing.

But the pleasures were too often obscured by emphasis on the big gesture. The prejudices of Verona seemed the least of anyone's troubles.